OPINIONS ARE SHARPLY
divided over whether the
election of Pratibha Patil as
president of India should be hailed as
a giant step for womankind, or
whether she is just a political pawn in
a clever game played by Sonia
Gandhi, head of the country’s
Congress Party. Whether the press
lambastes Patil for alleged dramatic
sins—including abetting a murder
and misappropriating funds—or hails
her elevation as a feminist triumph,
almost everyone is waiting for India’s
first woman president to show what
she’s made of.

Her record is one of social reform:
setting up educational institutions,
cooperatives and training schools for
the visually challenged. The marginalized
poor, tribals and rural citizens
have been her past focus. She scored
enough points with the populace to
ensure she never lost an election since
entering politics in 1962, at age 27.

She also enjoyed powerful mentors,
including senior Congress Party leaders
from her home state, Maharashtra,
and served in their shadows in various
ministerial capacities. But she accomplished
nothing as a minister that was
pathbreaking, or even helpful, to
women. As opposition leader in the
state’s legislative assembly, and later
deputy chair of Parliament’s Rajya
Sabha (upper house), Patil conducted
herself well. But in getting elected to
the Lok Sabha (lower house), she
merely served to add to her party’s
numbers before being called to take
the post of governor of Rajasthan.

Hers might have been a career
with neither blemish nor brilliance,
except for the barbs she provoked by
her freewheeling statements. These
included a suggestion, when she
was health minister of Maharashtra,
that people with hereditary diseases
should be compulsorily sterilized.
Patil also angered Muslim leaders by
suggesting the purdah system should
be abandoned, since fear of Mughal
invaders abducting women was now
history. Her refusal to sign over a
bill to prevent conversions of Hindus
to Christianity also heightened
the impression that she was out of
her depth as governor of Rajasthan,
now that the umbrella of her mentors
couldn’t shield her. She never
made a decision, although the bill
was twice presented to her.

Recently, in a televised speech, Patil
lauded the giant steps Indian women
had made, especially the 1.2 million
women in governance at rural and
grassroots levels. Unfortunately, she
proposed no special support for them,
and no manifesto for further change.

So the verdict is still out. She could
do much to encourage India’s
women—by throwing her weight behind
adult and child education, equal
rights, safety in the home and so
many other issues. Otherwise, her
presidency will be one more token
salute to womankind, and she will be
one more woman who entered politics
to remain but a pawn in the game
still owned in India by men.